NEW YORK — You sometimes look at age as a detriment, but then you meet guys like Raul Ibanez and realize how it can be used as an advantage.

An unfair advantage, in some cases, especially if you consider the Yankees lineup as an embarrassment of riches.

Consider: A pitcher is often prone to relax after dancing through the one-through-six portion of the abattoir like a drunken bomb-disposal specialist, and sometimes there’s a guy like Ibanez sitting way down at the No. 7 spot, cranking a fastball that turns your glorious day into a nightmare.

Only this isn’t an ordinary No. 7 hitter who ruined the Mets’ hopes for a chance to sweep the series by helping the Yanks score a 4-3 triumph with his three-run laser in the seventh inning. Ibanez is the kind of guy who turns perseverance and attitude and opportunity into a winning equation no matter what a pitcher is throwing.

“I’m very thankful for these times,” the 40-year-old outfielder said Saturday night. “But it’s true to a large extent: I’ve had to fight for everything, so as a younger or older player, I’ve managed to see not just the game differently, but life differently.”

The result is a winning perspective and a charisma you don’t often find in a baseball clubhouse. Indeed, this is the kind of raw material out of which organized social clubs and charities create their foundation — a player poll in Sports Illustrated once ranked him second only to Jim Thome among the game’s most admired people.

As Nick Swisher put it, “I’m a believer in good things happening to good people — and Raul’s an incredibly great person. But he also busts his butt every day. He’s one of the most in-shape guys we have on this squad, and he’s 40 years old. You just look at the guy and know when he comes to the ballpark, he means business.”

But as you might recall, he almost didn’t make it to the ballpark — this one or any one in a major-league city.

Ibanez spent four years in Single- or Double-A ball, and five more years shuttling between Triple-A and the bigs. Even when he thought he found a home as a five-position player with Kansas City in 2001, the Royals released him — twice.

And all 29 teams passed on him — twice.

“I’ve learned that if you keep fighting and believing, no matter how many times you get knocked down — and here comes the cliché, but it’s true — it’s about how much you get back up with determination and will,” he said. “That determination and will is more important than intelligence, it’s more important than talent. A lot of it is just the mentality that you’re never going to quit.”

The turning point for him was in the summer of ’01, when he tracked down former All-Star third baseman Kevin Seitzer, who broke his swing down over three fateful days. The Royals gave him another chance, and Ibanez wound up hitting .280.

“Who I was in my mind and who I was in reality — they were so far apart, and that was the hardest thing to deal with,” Ibanez recalled. “Because in my mind, I was an everyday player who could drive in 100 runs and hit 20-plus home runs. I believed I could do that. But when the reality is that you’re getting designated for assignment twice in a month — and everyone passes — that’s when I had to call Kevin, who turned my career around.”

The effects were immediate: The next season, he became a regular for the first time in his career — at the age of 30 — and drove in 103 runs for the Royals.

Now he’s still winning games at age 40.

This time, it took the form of crushing a Chris Young fastball to right, a weird hook that soccer fans would recognize as a banana kick inside the right post, which tied the game at 3-3.

With one swing, Ibanez turned the series around, before leaving it to Eric Chavez to blast the winner.

“It’s just who he’s been his whole career,” Joe Girardi said. “He’s not a guy that I really think focuses on the previous at-bat, or the previous day or the previous week. He’s just a guy that gives you a solid at-bat every time he goes out there. He knows how to get big hits for you. That’s one of the reasons we went out and got him.”

He’s got 11 homers and 35 RBI in 58 games as a part-time player from the seven hole.
Ordinary numbers for a Yankee? Maybe. Only he has more RBI than Alex Rodriguez, and a higher slugging percentage than Mark Teixeira.

So if the Yanks somehow take the show into late October, this is the guy they’ll thank for keeping this juddering mess of an offense in gear for the first half of the year while their stars tried to get their acts together.

A 40-year-old guy who once thought he might not be playing baseball much past 30.
A bonus decade of wisdom. It’s something the Yankees now benefit from every day.